Ever since it was founded in 2016, Legion M has been shaking up how entertainment is made and taking fans along for the ride.

Using equity crowdfunding laws enabled by the JOBS Act they created the world’s first fan-owned entertainment company giving those same fans their first-ever chance to invest directly in film and television. Legion M has, to date, raised over $3 million from a community of fans who are emotionally and financially invested in the business, creating a grassroots network to support projects the company backs.

One such project is Bad Samaritan, the latest movie from producer-director Dean Devlin. Dean's films, which include Independence Day, Godzilla, and Stargate, have amassed more than $1 billion at the box office. He remains one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers and continues to disrupt and innovate.

I caught up with Devlin and Legion M’s co-founders Jeff Annison and Paul Scanlan, to talk about Bad Samaritan, how the partnership came about and why they’re doing something together that the studios can’t, or won’t, do.

Simon Thompson: Dean, how did you come to team up with Legion M to release Bad Samaritan?

Dean Devlin: I had not heard of Legion M until after I had completed the film otherwise I probably would have contacted them from day one. Once I was aware of them I felt like their philosophy was akin to my own. We were introduced shortly after Sundance this year. As we started talking about the company they were educating me on what they were doing and it felt like an absolutely perfect fit for what we're trying to accomplish, my overall beliefs about the industry and where we're going. I was instantly very anxious to work with them so we screened the movie, fortunately they really liked it and we struck up a partnership.

Paul Scanlan: We'd been wanting to meet with Dean for quite some time, being fans of his and all of the great franchises that he's given us. He's one of the biggest producers in Hollywood and we had learned that he was looking to do some things independently. He had just finished Bad Samaritan, he was getting ready for distribution and it was the ideal opportunity for Legion M and Electric Entertainment to team up. The timing could not have worked out more perfectly. We're hoping there are more opportunities to do that in the future.

ST: Dean, the phrase 'industry disruptor' is widely used for those who want to do things differently. Is that how you see Legion M?

DD: I think the results of what they're doing may be a disruptor, but in reality, what they're doing is taking advantage of a giant flaw in our business. For years and years the entertainment industry functioned without ever developing a one-on-one relationship with their customers. Corporations bought up the studios and they had to answer to Wall Street. Legion M is the only company of its kind in the world that doesn't have to answer to Wall Street; they have to answer to the fans. Their model will only work with a one-on-one relationship with their customers because their customers are their investors. I just think it's exactly what our business needs right now. It needs a strong, supported and fan-focused entertainment company. This allows the average person to invest in genre entertainment. This is a company that isn't doing it as a business model, these are people are doing genre entertainment because they genuinely love it and that passion is what's fuelling the investors, the fans themselves. There's a synergy, it's a passion-based company and I find that's sorely lacking in our business right now.

ST: If we’re looking to start making movies that are heavily influenced by what fans want to see, does that create a potentially difficult situation in the industry where what we get is for those fans and not a broader, general audience?

DD: My position is that the fans are the broader, general audience. What we're doing lately is we're pandering to, for example, Rotten Tomatoes so we can do award season. The problem is that most people never see the films that are being nominated during awards season. I think we live in a time when we're watching, year after year, box office sales and movie audience numbers dropping. I think they're dropping for a reason. I think they're dropping because we have overly systemized making films. We've tried to create a system where every product has to have a pre-existing audience; everything has to be based on something else. At a certain point, the audience feels that they’ve seen everything that they're being offered and there's no reason to rush out to the theaters. What fans have always embraced is something that's exciting. Now, sometimes that's a franchise like we just saw with Avengers: Infinity War and sometimes it's something brand new. If the prevailing wisdom is that everything has to have previously exploited IP then they would never have been a Star Wars, there would never have been an Indiana Jones, there would never have been an E.T., there would never have been a Terminator and so on.

ST: Seeing how Legion M has grown and what you have already put out over the last 18 months, what are the lessons you've learned? By that I don't mean just from your financial results, I also mean from the reactions of industry luminaries like Dean.

Jeff Annison: I think the biggest thing we've learned over the past couple of years is the real strength and power of the fans and of the community. To Dean’s point on the last question, it's important to note that we're a fan-owned company but not one where the fans make the content. It's not the sort of thing where everybody gets around and votes on storylines and all that sort of stuff because at the end of the day that's not what fans want. Our whole philosophy is that you don't make great art by committee, you make great art by finding artists that you want to invest in and then get out of their way. So, for us, the real power of the Legion is the fact that you've got this enormous group of people who are financially and emotionally invested in the products that we make. What we're hoping that this leads to over time is the ability for creators to take more risk, to not necessarily have to play it safe by making Fast and Furious 17 but to be able to tell original stories and create new franchises. If you look at it from just purely a financial standpoint, it is extremely powerful. Our long-term goal is to unite one million fans as shareholders of our company. We're going to have hundreds of millions of dollars to develop projects and to invest in people and storytellers and more important we're going to have a million people stand behind them when those movies come out. We think that creates massive potential and one of the most influential companies in Hollywood.

ST: Is it getting easier or harder to make content and get it seen in a financially viable way? It can be hard to secure a large number of screens for independent movies and, along with that, we've seen huge growth in streaming and VOD services.

DD: I think the jury is out. What we're about to see with our film is whether or not we can make this a viable business model. But I'll tell you this already, we made the film 100% independently, no studio was involved. We financed the film, we shot the film, we could put the whole thing together and we're now releasing it independently. As of last night, we're up to 1,900 screens and that's kind of remarkable. There's a chance that we may even get up to 2,000 screens before Friday. So, on a completely independent movie, we're getting a level of support that, quite frankly, is beyond what I had expected. Now, is this going to work? We're going to see, we're going to find out, but it's been a remarkable experience and I think that there is an opportunity there. There's less distributors, every year there's going to be another one going away, Fox is merging with Disney so that's another big one that's going to vanish and, for the most part, the studios have decided to make either very inexpensive kind of found footage movies or they want to make $200 million sequel franchises. That leaves a lot of room for off-the-menu items that have, I think, a following and that people have an interest in but they're not being served. I think that gives companies like Legion M and my company, Electric Entertainment, an opportunity to serve some menu items that the studios aren't doing anymore.

PS: I would just add that what I'm particularly excited about is how much transformation is occurring in this space right now. It's clearly easier, from a technical standpoint, to make high-quality content. Several years ago it was extremely expensive for people to create something that looked super high quality but today that barrier is easier to get over. I think one thing that makes us really bullish about our Legion M model is that, no matter what happens in the industry, the distribution model and how people consume the content, two things that will always matter are great creative content and the audience. We feel like Legion M is at the nexus of that because we're going directly to the audience. We don't make a distinction between a fan and an audience. People that go to see films or consume content are fans, they might not all go to Comic-Con but they watch content and so we're uniting them together, they co-own the company and no matter how the industry shakes out, they will always matter. A thousand years from now, after all the different transformations in the entertainment space, it will still be the audience that is the most important and critical piece.

ST: Dean, what have you learned from this experience with Legion M that you are going to incorporate into how you operate as a producer and director?

DD: I don't know if it's changing my opinion as much as confirming my belief. In other words, I think the biggest thing to come out of the experience is understanding that my own personality type functions much better independently than within the studio system. That may be a character flaw of mine, I don't know, but I don't have the right kind of personality to work at studios. When I do work independently I tend to do better work and I tend to do things that are more successful. What I'm finding is that what we're doing now with Legion M harkens back to the very beginning of my career. The first movie I ever produced was a film called Stargate and very much like Bad Samaritan, it was independently financed. Every single studio in Hollywood rejected it, they all said the science fiction is dead and nobody cared about sci-fi anymore. We found out that MGM had a hole in their distribution schedule, they had no films to release for a couple of months, and so we convinced them to release Stargate. They didn't believe in the movie and they didn't really want to put any money behind it so I spent a year going to every sci-fi convention in the country, we invented the first movie website because the internet was pretty new and no-one had done that before. We were tracking to be a gigantic bomb. I have an article from Variety somewhere that says, "Biggest flop ever?" We ended up being the largest October opening in history and it was 100 percent bottom up instead of top down. It wasn't that there was an enormous amount of money spent telling the audience you're going to love this picture, there was an army of people who are fans who became ambassadors for the film and told their friends and generated tickets from the ground up. That's why for me when I heard what Legion M is doing it was very familiar to me and I felt like I'd seen it work before.

JA: This is why we fell in love with Dean at first sight. It's because of the fact that he understands what it is we're doing and he's also an innovator. You touched on all the technical disruption and the business model changes that are going on and that can make for mayhem. However, it's actually perfect for innovators and people that recognize all the disruption that is happening creates enormous opportunities. They're people like Dean who understand fans and are willing to go off the beaten path, take risks and try new things. Another thing we're doing is creating opening weekend meetups where volunteers from Legion M can set one up at a local screening of Bad Samaritan. It's a way for them to go out and see their movie, they're participating in putting this on the big screen by investing in this film and they're also bringing out all their friends. There are over 120 scheduled at this point so thousands of people are coming out to see an opening night of a movie like this. I think that's when you know there's such power there. It's really been a wonderful opportunity for us working on Bad Samaritan. That's partly due to the fact that Dean is such an innovator and gets what we're doing, and it's partly because of the fact that it's a great product. We saw the movie and liked it so much that we invested in it; we brought our legion to bear.

Bad Samaritan hits theaters on May 4, 2018. You can find out more about Legion M here.

Simon Thompson is a freelance producer (TV & Digital), film & entertainment journalist and broadcaster. From the UK, he now lives and works in LA. He's on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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